Sidney Crosby’s overtime goal to win Olympic gold the best Canadian goal in recent history

Team Canada's Sidney Crosby celebrates after scoring the game-winning goal against Team USA in overtime during gold medal hockey final at the Vancouver Olympic Games on Feb. 28, 2010.

By:Wendy GillisStaff Reporter, Published on Fri Sep 21 2012

Our eyes were locked on the screen, on that little black dot darting from stick to stick, and we were pleading with it, willing it, to just go in.

Or, stay the hell away, depending.

We were packed into a Yonge Street pub that Sunday afternoon, a rowdy crowd bedecked in red and white from head to toe and watching every minute, rapt and nervous and excited.

We’d just been through a roller-coaster three periods that, with 24 seconds left in regulation time and Canada up by one, ended with a 2-2 draw. Now, we were seven minutes into heart-attack-inducing overtime when Sydney Crosby made a weak shot on goal. U.S. goaltender Ryan Miller blocked it, then guided it into the corner.

Crosby chased after the puck, passed it off to Jarome Iginla, who then sent it back to Crosby, now back in front of the net.

He’d already become Canada’s biggest star, the next Wayne Gretzky. But 7:40 minutes into OT, Crosby solidified his status as a national hero. With that shot, Crosby scored the biggest goal my generation has ever seen.

Like countless Canadians, I had gathered together with close friends to watch the final match of the Olympic Games in Vancouver — Games our country had proudly hosted, Games that saw our best-ever Olympic showing. We wanted to see them properly, unforgettably capped with men’s hockey gold.

Winning hadn’t seemed a shoe-in. Our American rivals had beaten us 5-3 in the preliminary round, forcing us to play an additional game and inviting the spectre of a loss at our own Games.

Four years earlier, there’d been heartbreak and humiliation — an inconceivable seventh-place finish in Turin. This, after Canada’s ultimate comeback at Salt Lake in 2002, a gold-medal Olympic win after a 50-year drought.

Even that game — while undeniably epic — was not host to the single most unforgettable goal in living memory. That’s just not possible in a 5-2 win. Those five goals were great. We stood up and cheered. Some of us cried. But do most of us remember the details of any one amazing goal? Didn’t think so.

It’s also nearly impossible to assign the holy title of ‘best Canadian goal’ to an NHL team. Sure, when a Canadian team makes it to the Stanley Cup final, many of us temporarily set aside previous allegiances. As a diehard Canadiens fan, I hopped on the Flames bandwagon in 2004 and cheered for the Canucks during every playoff game in 2011.

But not even the most popular NHL team can compete with the universality of Team Canada. A common goal against a common foe is what brings us together, and what makes the stakes so high. The best Canadian goal has to be scored by a player wearing the Maple Leaf, and be fuelled by the support of a nation.

So what could be top a goal scored by the nation’s top athlete, against our North American rivals, during a tense OT period, for the gold medal at our own Olympic Games?

Hockey movie screenwriters would crumple that too-perfect scenario up and toss it in the wastebasket. But it happened, and it’s indisputably, undeniably, the best goal in Canadian history.

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